The present invention relates generally to an improved tray for dispensing and wetting pre-pasted wallpaper. Generally, modern wallpaper is pre-pasted. That is to say, paste is applied at the factory and dried on the back of the paper. The paper is then bundled into tightly-turned rolls for sale. Accordingly, the user must unroll a portion of paper and cut it to size before wetting.
To hang the paper, the user must wet the paper in a prescribed manner and then affix it to the surface to be papered. In order to perform the paper hanging in a durable manner, having no air bubbles, and further so that the paper will not shrink, the paper must be uniformly wetted with a very short maximum dwell time in the wetting medium. Generally, the maximum dwell time for wetting the paper is in the range of 10 to 15 seconds.
Currently, a simple rectangular tray is available for a user to wet pre-pasted wallpaper. In order to cut the wallpaper to a desired size, the roll end must be restrained, the wallpaper must be unrolled, the roll itself then restrained, and the desired piece measured and cut. This cumbersome process can be extremely difficult to accomplish by one person. After cutting the paper to size, the user must reverse the roll of paper in order to remove some of the inherent "memory" which results from the paper being rolled at the factory, re-roll the cut piece, immerse it in the tray, and remove it extremely quickly in order to avoid overwetting the adhesive.
When using the rectangular tray currently available, an undesirable result is often obtained due to inconsistent wetting of the adhesive over the length of the cut piece. This results in poor adhesion, which may be manifested in the form of bubbles or separating edges occurring months after installation. The non-uniform wetting is caused by the fact that a rolled piece is immersed in the tray, and contact between the finished surface of an interior layer and the pasted surface of the next layer is therefore unavoidable.
Using the rectangular tray of the prior art is extremely cumbersome, and may require a second person to hold the cut piece of paper under the surface of the water as the end is being withdrawn, since the paper is not otherwise restrained. Further, the possibility of non-uniform wetting and the cumbersome aspects of withdrawing the paper make control of the total wetting time uncertain. Finally, since the prior art contains no dispenser, it is difficult to measure and cut the wallpaper with the rectangular tray of the prior art.